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Remixing w/ the Canon Vixia.

This Spring and Fall I’m launching a visiting artist series of lectures at colleges and universities around the country. My first stop is the Matrilineage Symposium for women in art at Syracuse University.

In preparation, I’ve received a lot of feedback from my How-To Remix series. Some of my steps worked for people, some didn’t. In an effort to get to the heart of the problem, I recently made a Remix House Call and posted the video of our trials and tribulations recording off the TV. It took about 30 minutes to set up; most of that time was spent trouble shooting and that trouble shooting was edited out for your benefit. This tutorial should make your set up time about 5 minutes.

The take away: HD cameras and HD TVs have somewhat different set ups and it’s all going to depend on your equipment. My first round of steps was completed using an HD TV and a regular 6 year old Handicam video camera. For this update we used a regular standard definition TV and an HD camera.

1. You must have VLC player installed in order to run Handbrake. It’s a free program that’s great to have on your computer because it plays virtually an video file… it’s also required for Handbrake.

2. Once you’ve downloaded VLC and Handbrake, launch them both. In Handbrake, select “Source” (upper Left hand corner) and select your DVD, then the Video_TS folder. It’ll make some noises and adjust its self for a second. Then comes the settings: the screenshots I posted make it look all easy to click through the recommended settings in Handbrake. Click to enlarge them. They are still correct but the settings are fussy. This is very misleading and I’m really sorry. Once you get to the lower half (image #3) of the Handbrake screen (the top is not as fussy), you have to finagle a few things in this order:

First, select constant quality to RF:15.

Second, select average bitrate and make it 192.

Then select 2-pass encoding to the left of it.

This is completely the opposite order of things you would normally do them in, hence my updated workflow.